Enter Chris Bennedsen: Scrapbook of a Life in Letters Timeline


"Dear Everyone": Writing a Life


During the 51 years of Christian Bennedsen's life in Canada, he sent and received over 700 pieces of correspondence, and he saved them all. He saved a lot more than that as well. He wrote regularly to his mother and father, brother and sister, and other family and friends back in his hometown of Spandet, Denmark. Christian's letter-writing connected him to the Danish world he had left behind, like many immigrants coming to Canada from other parts of the world. Writing became a way of coping with anxieties, disappointments, frustrations, nostalgia, and happiness, and a way of sharing this with his correspondents. Through his letters, he could compare the old world to the new, and reassure everyone that he was doing just fine, even when he wasn't.
I have a lot of trouble trying to keep up with my writing now but I still manage all right. I received 11 letters last week and I think that is the most I have received in one week since my arrival. I have just counted all my letters and I have received 119 and they are all safe in my drawer here but I am still ahead in my writing. This letter is number 123 that I have written since I left home.
Chris Bennedsen to Anna Bennedsen, October 7, 1952.
(CMC,
Christian Bennedsen Collection,
Correspondence series, Box P-29, 11th group,
translated from Danish by Chris Bennedsen)
Although Christian corresponded with many family members and friends, he and his mother, Anna Bennedsen, maintained an especially intense correspondence. She told him of her never-ending days of work and of the goings-on in their small village. He created a picture for her of the new world in which he was living. They were clearly each other's closest confidants. The relationship flourished despite the great distance between them.
Now I can't go with you like we used to, go shop and talk. And I miss that. Sigvard just said the other day, that you always wanted to have your Mom with you when you went out to shop for clothes and that way you always managed to buy a few little things for him and now I really miss those times when we walked in the streets and stopped for coffee and talked and maybe someday again.
Anna Bennedsen to Chris Bennedsen, May 23, 1952.
(CMC,
Christian Bennedsen Collection,
Correspondence series, Box P-29, 11th group,
translated from Danish by Chris Bennedsen)
Chris wrote his first letter from Copenhagen on November 27, 1951, as he waited to board the SS Oslofjord, and he kept up his prodigious output for many years after his arrival in Canada. During his first eleven months, Chris became part of a letter-writing network that produced 242 pieces of mail exchanged with family, friends, and neighbours in Spandet.

In all, the network comprised twenty correspondents. Most of the 700 letters in the Canadian Museum of Civilization Christian Bennedsen Collection were sent and received between 1951 and 1959. The postal system in both countries was remarkably reliable at this time: During the first few years, only one letter was lost and more than a few letters travelled across the Atlantic by airmail. In those early days, each letter cost between five and fifteen cents to send home, and took just 5 days to get to Spandet; a return letter also took only five days.
I read them many times all of them. And I don't know what I would do without them.
Chris Bennedsen to Anna Bennedsen, January 7, 1952.
(CMC,
Christian Bennedsen Collection,
Correspondence series, Box P-29, 11th group,
translated from Danish by Chris Bennedsen)


Bennedsen on his first visit to Niagara Falls, 1954.
(Private Collection)
The exhibit you are about to explore tells the remarkable story of a post-war immigrant to Canada, through his eyes and words. The Christian Bennedsen Collection in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's archives contains hundreds of letters, thousands of photographs, work diaries, Danish-Canadian newsletters, passports, citizenship papers, other emigration/immigration materials, and moving images. We have used this unique and fascinating collection to construct the story you are about to discover. We invite the reader to visit this modest, personal piece of Canada's post-war history by retracing the steps and rereading some of the letters of a Dane who came to this country shortly after the soldiers came marching home from war. Immigrants like Chris Bennedsen and his Italian-Canadian wife Connie planted the seeds in Toronto of a new kind of society that would eventually step far beyond the British bounds of its original cultural and ethnic composition. Rooted in the past, Chris Bennedsen's story has something to say about where Canada, a community of many communities, might be headed in the next century.
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1. Spandet 2. Settlement 2. Settlement 3. The Colangelos Introduction 4. A Dane in Little Italy 5. Work 5. Work 6. Memory 6. Memory Introduction Introduction